Days of Fruit Tramp's Painful Harvest Fade

By PETER T. KILBORN, Special to The New York Times

Published: July 14, 1990

WEST COLUMBIA, S.C.—
Luther Henry Tindal, who is 45 years old and looks 60, and his wife, Linda, 34, rest on a dust-caked couch outside their $125-a-month cinderblock shack here, smoking discount cigarettes and drinking discount beer.

Their four children, ages 2 to 15, play in the sandy soil under a walnut tree with Buck, the pet goat, and Tramp Two, the pet mongrel. (An alligator in Florida ate Tramp One.) ''L. H.,'' as people know Mr. Tindal, had all his teeth pulled years ago, and Mrs. Tindal has lost most of hers. He is 5 feet 6 inches tall and once weighed 125 pounds. He says he is now down to about 95; he speculates that this is because of - a bout with tuberculosis four years ago and working among pesticides in fruit orchards.

Poverty and Hard Work

Mr. Tindal's poverty, his hard living and the toll of both on his health are emblems of a disappearing strain of migrant farm workers. He is a one of a huge clan, current and former migrant workers all, that includes his four other children from a previous marriage, his 10 brothers and sisters, Mrs. Tindal's 15 brothers and sisters, along with scores of cousins, other relatives and unrelated hangers-on.

These are ''Grapes of Wrath'' people, native-born Americans, who follow the fruit and vegetable harvests in jalopies from Florida through Georgia and the Carolinas to Michigan and upstate New York. Unlike most migrant workers who are bound to a crew chief, these are independent operators who take pride in their skills, covet their freedom and exist in the shadows of public scrutiny. They call themselves ''fruit tramps'' to distinguish themselves from other migrant workers. Some others call them ''freewheelers.''

Fruit tramps are hard to spot because they try to live outside the law and contemporary conventions. Few have gone beyond junior high school. Mr. Tindal said he stopped at the 5th grade and his wife in the 10th. They say they have never voted, had a bank account, saved any money or owned a home and had a telephone only once, for a few months. Like some of the other men in his family, Mr. Tindal has never had a driver's license, although until recently he did drive.

They put up with Social Security tax deductions when they work for big farmers, who have too much to lose in evading the law. But they seek payment in cash, without deductions, from small farmers and people who give them part-time jobs. On rare occasions and when produce prices were higher, a family could earn $500 to $600 a week, but often with the help of their children in violation of the child labor laws. Now they say it would be hard to earn $400.

A Dying Breed

Clans like the Tindals and his wife's family, the Moteses, did most of the nation's migrant labor until 30 or 40 years ago, when teams made up only of men began moving in. More recently Hispanic, Haitian and Jamaican workers began taking the jobs once claimed by American families. Like Mr. Tindal's health, the American migrant clans are fading, victims of the way they live and the brutal economics of farm work.

Officials at the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture say they have stopped trying to count migrant workers because they are too elusive. Unofficial estimates range from hundreds of thousands to several million, but families hardly show up. Certainly there are a few hundred fruit tramps, possibly a few thousand; most of them are white. That fruit tramps persist is in part the discovery of a photojournalist, Herman Emmet, who came upon the Tindals in the late 1970's. He lived and worked with the Tindals off and on for more than a decade and wrote about them in a book of photographs called ''Fruit Tramps,'' published last year by the University of New Mexico Press.

Mrs. Tindal's 58-year-old mother, Betty Motes, who like her husband, Leroy, and her parents was an itinerant fruit picker, said a dozen families around her neighborhood in Fort Pierce, Fla., are fruit pickers. Everette W. Noel, one of the many peach growers 50 miles from here in Johnston, S.C., which calls itself ''The Peach Capital of the World,'' has employed the families for years. He turned them away this season, however, because storms and a March freeze mutilated his crop.

Mr. Noel prefers to hire migrant families because, he said, they are relatively stable and seem not to use hard drugs. ''They're not bad,'' Mr. Noel said. ''Just kind of defeated. Their problem is alcohol.''

Picture of Southern Poverty

Mr. Tindal's arms and emaciated torso are covered with primitive tattoos. He said he got most of them while on a prison chain gang when he was 18. On his left shoulder is a tattoo that says ''Live hard'' and on the right one that says ''Die young.'' He got his latest tattoos some weeks ago, little crosses on his neck to align a radiation machine for treating his throat cancer.

The Tindals have lived here for almost a year, longer than any place else, so that Mr. Tindal can be treated 20 minutes away in Columbia. At Lot 100C, beyond the Silver Lake trailer park, the house presents a stereotypical picture of Southern rural poverty, with light bulbs hanging from wires, a decrepit washing machine resting in a puddle outside the kitchen door, the hulk of an abandoned car on one side of the house and the hulk of another beyond the clothesline in front.